“The one you went to the Sinners’ Bash with,” I remind her.
“We only hung out once,” she says. “She was hella milquetoast. She probably would have rolled over after three minutes of missionary and turned on the news.”
“I think only men do that,” Ronique says from where she’s perched on Annabel Lee’s desk.
“Trust, girls can be just as bad in bed as guys.”
“Can they?” Ronique asks. “You have all the equipment. You know how to run it.”
“You’d think,” Annabel Lee says with a sigh.
“How can you tell if a girl is bad in bed?” I ask, thinking about the guys. Is that why Saint never wants to do anything, even when Father Salvatore has told us over and over that it’s not a sin?
“If you have to ask, you probably are,” Ronique says.
I’m relieved that Manson arrives just then, so the others are distracted and I don’t have to die of shame. He enters with a grocery bag in one hand and a takeout tray with four cups of coffee in the other.
“I come bearing gifts,” he says. “Period blues, begone!”
“Oh,” I say slowly, nodding as I realize what’s going on with Annabel Lee. She’s still sprawled dramatically across her bed, her billowing skirt spread around her, arm over her eyes like she’s fainted.
“Here, sit up, have this,” Manson says, sliding an arm under her and pulling her upright, holding the wide straw in her huge cup to her lips.
She clutches the cup in both hands like a squirrel clutching an acorn and slurps down half of the coffee, whipped cream, and caramel, then heaves a sigh and slumps against him. “Marry me.”
“I’d be honored,” he says, chuckling before planting a kiss on her head and picking up the bag. “Unfortunately, I yearn for the warm embrace of a man. Preferably a feral yet hot wild man who will whisk me away to his mysterious cottage in the middle of an abandoned forest.”
“Sorry to break it to you, but Tarzan is fictional.”
“Okay, first of all, I was thinking of the Huntsman, and secondly, shut up and take your blueberry muffin and the abomination you call chocolate.” He thrusts a smaller paper bag at her from insider the grocery sack. “I also got takeout. Let’s eat.”
Manson lays out the astrology spread in the center of the bed, Ronique joins us, and we all sit cross legged around the food, opening the containers.
“So, what did I miss?” Manson asks, tearing open a packet of chopsticks with his teeth. “Did Saint give it up yet? If he did, you better not have told them without me.”
“We were talking about whether Mercy sucks in bed,” Ronique says.
“I’m sure you don’t,” Manson says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “But we all start somewhere. If you want to tell us about your escapades, we can give you pointers.”
“Can you not?” Annabel Lee drawls. “I really don’t want to hear about whatever weird shit my cousin’s into. Just do your Kegels, and I’m sure he’ll be happy forever.”
“What are Kegels?”
“Oh, you sweet summer child,” Manson says. “I neither own nor rent in V-town, and even I know that.”
“Guys can do them too,” Annabel Lee says, as she pinches a bite of greasy noodles between her chopsticks.
“What?” Manson demands. “They can? What am I supposed to be tightening? Oh my god, amIbad in bed?”
Suddenly we’re all laughing, and this time, I’m laughing too, and it feels so easy, so right, that my throat closes up and I miss Eternity so badly I can’t breathe.
Along with the ache of longing and loneliness, though, there is the usual guilt. Guilt that I made other friends, and she didn’t. Guilt that I know that if she were here, I would be with her instead, and I’d miss this. That I’d be missing out on the friends who are here, and that makes me feel sad too, even though I probably wouldn’t even know they existed if she were here. She was like Annabel Lee, not in any tangible way, but in the way that she was the beating heart of the group.
That’s why it all fell apart without her. She would never have let that happen. She would have bridged the gap, held us together, never let anything come between us. That’s why, when something finally did, it was her.
Her disappearance shattered us, and even now, it’s what brought us back together.
By some unspoken, maybe even unconscious agreement, we had designated her the key.
